COP27: Vanessa Nakate Wants African Solutions for African Problems

Editor’s note: This essay is available in our print issue, A New Chapter for African Artefacts?. Buy the issue here.

A UNICEF Goodwill Ambassador and the author of A Bigger Picture: My Fight to Bring a New African Voice to the Climate Crisis, Nakate advocates for decolonizing climate change. She argues that African stories need to be told, and we need to listen to African communities on the ground and their needs. Nakate believes that we need to ensure that the climate change solutions funded are the ones that work for African people. Further, Western countries, being the largest historical emitters of greenhouse gases, need to lead the world in reduction of emissions, and provide funding to countries with less resources to reduce their emissions.

In the following conversation, we spoke to Nakate about the need to include and prioritize African voices, stories and climate issues at international conferences, the responsibilities on Western countries to fund global climate change solutions, and what decolonizing climate change solutions would look like.